Aggregation is a powerful tool when working with data in Django. With it you can have your database summarize or convert data into the format you need.

Searching for files using index tags is a common use case but the Azure documentation can be quite hard to grasp.

Template literal types are a powerful feature of TypeScript that you might not have heard of.

Media Queries are a CSS feature that can be used to conditionally apply selected styles on an HTML element. Some examples of media queries include checking for the width of the browser window, checking for the media type (print, screen), or checking for dark/light mode preference.

If you want to develop SEO friendly and fast websites with React, you have two choices: server-side rendering (SSR) or static site generation (SSG). But how

How can you filter a queryset by default so that no matter where you use the model, the filter will be applied?

The consensus in the React community now seems to be that, you should avoid using React.FC. But why is that?

It seems we have, in the web community, collectively forgotten the role of the URL in storing the state of our application.

A HTTP cookie is a small piece of data that a server sends to a user's web browser. The browser may then store the cookie and send it back to the same server with later requests.

If you've ever used Array.filter to filter a list to certain type of items, you've probably been hit by TypeScript not realizing what type of items your list contains after filtering. To fix this, you can use user-defined type guards.

Have you ever had your server disk space exhausted by Docker? Is it happening right now? What can we do?!

How can we define a type for an object, which has some required attributes and some attributes, of which one and only one must be defined?

Django Framework comes with a powerful ORM and query capabilities built-in. If you're only familiar with the basics of Djangos Query API, this article will introduce some more advanced queries and methods you can use.

If you're using a custom webpack config, you'll want to make sure the filename has a cache busting suffix.

Sometimes it's useful to convert a array to a map for convenience or performance reasons. But how can we achieve that so that the resulting code will be easy to understand?

In the second article of the series, we take a look at some of the CSS and layout

Grids are a powerfull feature of CSS but they can be a little overwhelming at first. In this article, we'll go through some basic concepts of CSS grids and learn how we can use grids to build layouts.

Ever wanted to create a cool 80's text with HTML and CSS? This article will show you how.

Debugging, or finding the reason why your code doesn't work, is one of the most important skills a software developer needs. If you can debug effectively, you'll catch problems faster and even gain a better understanding on how things work under the hood.

In this article, we will setup Spectron and use Testing Library and WebdriverIO to test an Electron.js application.

Testing Library is a JavaScript testing framework which focuses on testing the way the application is used.

Mock Service Worker (MSW) is a library for mocking, or faking, a backend API. This is extremely useful when you are developing new features into your application, or when you are running tests.

Ever wanted to create a theme for VS Code? It's simpler than you'd think but the process is a bit laborious and requires you to painstakingly go through all the attributes you need to change. If you want your theme to work, and look nice, on multiple programming languages, you'll need to add a lot of color definitions.

The CSS box model and it's behaviour with different box-sizing values might be difficult to visualize.

This has been a horrible year for most of us. COVID-19 has killed millions of people and changed life for millions more. The pandemic has also changed the way we work and live our daily lives. In this article I'm going to focus on the more positive things which have happened to me in 2020.

Some time ago I added excerpts to by blog. A small sample of the full blog text to is now shown on the front page after the post heading, date and tags. To make the exceprts look a bit nicer, I wanted add a effect which makes the text fade into the background.

useReducer is a React Hook which helps you manage complex state with a simple API. The hook takes a reducer function and the initial state as parameters. You can also pass in an optional argument which can be a function for lazy initialization of the state.

React projects have many options for managing state. While libraries like redux and mobx are a popular choice, React also has it's own API for managing state. The Context API is useful when you have state which is accessed in multiple places in your app and you want to avoid prop drilling...

If you want to display the current GPS location with your own custom graphics in React Native Maps, you need to create a custom Marker. This is done fairly easily, since the Marker component accepts a View as child.

React Strict Mode is a tool, which comes with React, for detecting possible issues and problems in your application. Currently (Sept. 2020) Strict Mode detects if you have unsafe lifecycle methods, usage of legacy string ref API, usage of findDOMNode, detecting unexpected side effects or detecting usage of legacy context API.

Sometimes we need access a DOM element which is contained by another React component. If we try to just use ref and pass it to the child component, we get an error. This is because ref is a reserved prop name so you can't pass it to a child component. Instead we can use forwardRef when defining the child component.

One of the great "batteries included" features Django has, is the automatically generated admin panel. It provides a simple UI for creating, editing and deleting data defined with the Django ORM. In this article we are going to enable the admin user interface for a simple model and customize it from a simple list view to a more user friendly table like interface.

Python standard library has a handy collection factory function called namedtuple, which can be used to assign names for each position in a tuple. Named tuples behave otherwise like a normal tuples but each element has a name which can be used for retrieving the value just like with class objects.

With CSS you can use absolute units like the familiar px, pt or relative units like em and rem . Absolute units are quite simple to use and rarely cause confusion. Relative units however can twist your brain if your not familiar with how they work.

React Hooks are a way of adding logic to your functional components in an simple and elegant way. In addition to the standard hooks like useState or useEffect you can also create your own hooks if find you need the same logic in multiple components.

Inspired by some of Jon Gjensets Rust streams and videos I decided to start learning Rust (again!). I've previously read part of the Rust book but never started any projects with it so I didn't retain much of it.

useEffect is a hook added in React 16.8. It allows you to perform side effects in function components. This means you can update things outside of React based on your props and state. Fetching data when the component state changes, changing the page <title> or connecting to a WebSocket server are all examples of side effects that can be done with useEffect.

In this article I'll show you how to implement dark mode in your blog or site using CSS variables and how the toggle it automatically based on the users preferred color scheme.

There's a few ways to loop over a object in JavaScript. Let's look at a couple of them. Let's say we have a object like this

Hooks are an React API that were introduced in React 16.8 a little more than a year ago (february 2019). They let you use state in your React components without writing classes.

Memoization is a optimization technique frequently used in functional programming. It means storing the result of a computationally intensive function call and returing the cached result when the function is called with the same arguments.

Confusing class variables and instance variables in Python is a pretty common mistake. Or.. atleast I've made it more than once. Python doesn't use static keyword but instead the location the variables are defined in to differentiate between the two which will seem pretty foreign to people coming from other object oriented languages.

I’ve gotten used to a functional programming style in JavaScript and I’m finding I want to use same kind of paradigms in Python. Builtin methods like map() and filter() already help but the functools module provides additional ways to do functional programming. Let’s look at what the functools.partial function can do.

Automatically generating UI from a schema document can be a powerful prototyping tool or can even be used to build simple apps if the requirements aren't too complex. One awesome library for generating UIs from json-schemas is react-jsonschema-form. react-jsonschema-from can be used to automatically generate forms in a React application from a JSON schema document.

Recently I had to setup a web app with simple one step user registration. After some searching I came accross a Django library called django-registration which seemed like the best way to implement user registration. It features single step and two step registration flows, some simple views and simple installation and configuration. In this blog post I’m going to go over the steps needed to implement user registration in a Django app.